History of Kyiv

The history of Kyiv (Kiev), officially begins when it was founded in 482, but the city may date back at least 2,000 years. Archaeologists have dated the oldest known settlement in the area to 25,000 BC.^[1] Initially a 6th-century Slavic settlement, it gradually acquired eminence as the center of East Slavic civilization. Kyiv's Golden Age as the capital of medieval Kievan Rus' came from 879 to 1240.

Legend says that three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, founded the city with their sister Lybid, and named it for Kyi, the eldest brother. The century of this founding has not been determined. Legend has it that Saint Andrew (d. AD 60/70), was fascinated by the spectacular location on the hilly shores of the Dnieper River and prophesied that a great city would emerge there.

Its political, but not cultural, importance declined drastically in 1169, when the troops of Andrey Bogolyubsky pillaged it; the old town was destroyed, and the capital moved to Vladimir. Numerous sackings of Kyiv by Rus' princes followed and it was completely destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1240.^[2]

In the following centuries, the city was a provincial capital of marginal importance on the outskirts of territories controlled by powerful neighbors: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its successor the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tsardom of Russia, which later became the Russian Empire. Kyiv was also a major political and cultural center for Ukrainian nation, especially during the Cossack Hetmanate in the 17–18 centuries. A Christian city since 988, it helped preserve the traditions of Orthodox Christianity, especially under Catholic Poland, and the atheist Soviet Union.

Kyiv prospered in the Russian industrial revolution of the late 19th century. In the conflicts and turbulence that followed the October Revolution of 1917, it became the capital of several short-lived Ukrainian states. From 1921 on. it was part of the Soviet Union, and from 1934 the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In World War II the city was again destroyed, almost completely, but quickly recovered post-war, to become the third-most important Soviet city and the capital of the second-most populous Soviet republic. It remains the capital of Ukraine, independent since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.